Mock Ramblings

Friday, December 9, 2016

Started to go to bed early last night... Instead, I wound up staying up with Firstborn to help him finish math, a study guide for Social Studies, and his weekly reading log. So this morning, I crawled out of bed and tried to get everybody else moving, and...

No. Just no.

Nobody else was moving. Nobody else was going to get up and Do All The Things. So I crawled back out, microwaved a couple of sausage biscuits for the boys, and made the faces- erm, made the lunches. ("Did you have that dream where the little gnome-bugs are putting lunches together for the boys, but when you open them up they have our faces inside?" Apparently my wife did not have that dream. Probably just me, then.) Which is fine, but I have sworn a mighty vow that tonight I will come home, climb into bed, and fall directly asleep.

Meanwhile, the heating in our house isn't working. Which is probably why nobody wants to get out of bed.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

So, the two kids we were supposed to be watching were perfectly nice. The girl was about eight, the boy a couple of years younger. Mostly they just sat on the couch and watched TV while we were waiting for bedtime.

The problem was the house.

Well, the house and the ghosts. If you turned on the lights - or maybe particular combinations of the lights - you could see them. They were these figures outside the windows, screaming and pounding on the glass, but completely silent. And if you got enough of the lights in right combination of which ones were on and which ones were off, the rooms changed: different paint, different furniture, different hangings. Something about getting the lights arranged brought the house (or sections of it) closer to how it was when whatever created all these ghosts first happened.

We finally got enough of them right that the living room changed. Suddenly, the children we were supposed to be watching were gone, and there was another pair (another sister and brother) there instead... only these were ghosts. Kind of nasty ones, too. And once again, the only way to get rid of them was to complete the process and then deal with them somehow: as they had been? As they wanted to be? By preventing whatever had happened? Something. I'm not sure. I wasn't sure in the dream, either; I remember worrying that solving the puzzle might be going to trap me somehow, or make me vulnerable to the ghosts, I just didn't see any real choice.

So I finished arranging the lights, and the two child-ghosts went away. The other ghosts all melted together and flowed into the house as this sort of creeping black shadow, but I was somehow able to absorb them or consume them.

There was some other stuff later - the two kid-ghosts showed back up, and had to be settled into moving on - but that was after I'd woken up once, and it was much more disconnected.